What you say is true, but after years of working with TypeScript (and about 15 years of Java before that) I'd say that from a purely practical perspective the structural typing approach is much more productive.
I still have PTSD from the number of times I had to do big, painful refactorings in Java simply because of the way strong typing with nominal types works. I still shudder to think of Jersey 1.x to 2.x migrations from many years ago (and that was a PITA for many reasons beyond just nominal typing, but it could have been a lot easier with structural types).
I love branded types (and what I think of their close cousin of string template literal types in TS) because they make code safer and much more self-documenting with minimal effort and 0 runtime overhead.
I still have PTSD from the number of times I had to do big, painful refactorings in Java simply because of the way strong typing with nominal types works. I still shudder to think of Jersey 1.x to 2.x migrations from many years ago (and that was a PITA for many reasons beyond just nominal typing, but it could have been a lot easier with structural types).
I love branded types (and what I think of their close cousin of string template literal types in TS) because they make code safer and much more self-documenting with minimal effort and 0 runtime overhead.